Accueil / Romance / Sweet Revenge, Mr. CEO / Chapitre 111 - Chapitre 120

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Chapter 111: The new and the old

Serena’s POVThat damned kiss The skin still felt warm, sensitive, carrying the ghost of a touch that made my stomach twist in knots. In the garage, when he had pulled me out of the path of that accelerating car, there had been no strategy in his eyes. When his mouth had met mine, hot and desperate, the entire careful architecture of my revenge had dissolved into pure, terrifying feeling. For three seconds, I hadn't been Serena executing a plan. I hadn't been Elena playing a role. I had just been a woman drowning in the touch of a man I was supposed to destroy.A sickening wave of self-loathing hit me. I closed my eyes, digging my fingernails into the leather of my handbag until the skin turned white. I was losing the plot. I was letting the proximity, the shared history, the sheer gravitational pull of him pull me off course before I had even uncovered the truth about 2022.By the time the cab pulled up to the curb outside the house, my head was splitting.I unlocked the front door

Chapter 112: Something’s up

Serena's PovA preview from an unsaved number glowed on Vivian’s screen.I read it once, then again.The wording was intimate enough to tell me the sender wasn’t some event coordinator or corporate contact. Whoever this person was, they weren’t speaking to Vivian like a stranger. My thumb hovered over the notification before I tapped it.Unknown: Stop spiraling. Killian will marry you. I’m making sure of it.My eyes moved to Vivian’s reply.Vivian: I don’t know if I can keep doing this. He doesn’t love me. He barely looks at me. What if he backs out?Unknown: He won’t. Everything we did to clear the path was to put you in this position. Every obstacle we removed was for this. Just hold your ground like I promised you last year. We will remove anyone else who gets in the way.I stopped breathing.For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the words in front of me. My eyes kept moving over the same lines as though reading them a second or third time might somehow change what they said.Eve

Chapter 113: Something I no longer recognized

Serena’s POVMarcus had a way of delivering bad news that made it sound like a weather report. Calm, factual, completely indifferent to the fact that the world was on fire.“David Chen has called an emergency board meeting for this afternoon,” he said from the doorway, hands clasped in front of him. “He’s citing the logistics situation as a critical operational failure and recommending a full suspension of the Southeast Asian expansion pending a financial review.”Killian was already pushing back the covers before Marcus finished the sentence.“I’ll be there in an hour.”“You have a concussion,” I said.“I’m aware.”“The doctor said twenty-four hours minimum.”“The doctor doesn’t have David Chen running an emergency board meeting in his absence.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stopped. The movement clearly cost him more than he wanted to admit. His jaw tightened and he pressed two fingers briefly to his temple and waited for whatever was happening behind his eyes to pa

Chapter 114: It’s complicated

Serena’s POVKillian was discharged on a Thursday.I know because I was in a meeting with two of the regional port contacts when Louisa knocked and slid a note under the door that said simply, He’s out. Came in through the side entrance. Just thought you should know.I finished the meeting. Answered three emails. Reviewed the Helix Bridge restructuring timeline that Dominic had sent over that morning. I did everything I was supposed to do in exactly the order I was supposed to do it and I did not go up to the executive floor until six thirty when the building had mostly emptied out and I had run out of legitimate reasons to stay at my desk.His office light was on.I could see it from the corridor, that specific warm glow coming through the frosted glass panel beside his door, and I stood there for a moment telling myself I was just checking that he had actually rested the way he was supposed to and not spent his first day back running the company into the ground through sheer stubbor

Chapter 115: Whoever gets in the way

Serena’s POVI woke up at five forty-three and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling and thought about the fact that I had just made everything significantly more complicated.Not that it had been simple before. Nothing about this situation had been simple since the night I woke up in a stranger’s body with a stranger’s husband holding my hand and a child I had never met calling me mama. But there was a specific kind of complicated that came from kissing Killian Rhodes in an empty office at nine o’clock on a Thursday evening and driving home afterward with the windows down and the cold air doing nothing at all to clear my head.I got up before Dominic woke. I took my medication in the bathroom with the door closed and the tap running, a habit I had developed without consciously deciding to, and looked at my reflection in the mirror for a moment the way I sometimes did when the gap between who I was and who I was supposed to be felt particularly wide.Elena’s face looked back at me. D

Chapter 116: Isabelle

Serena’s POVI was on a call with the Blackwater port contact the next morning when my phone lit up with a message from Dominic’s assistant.There is a woman here asking for Mrs Reyes. She says she knows you. She won’t give her name and she won’t leave. She has been here for forty minutes. I am not sure what to do.I finished the call. Read the message again. Something about the phrasing, the specific combination of won’t give her name and won’t leave, told me this was not a confused client or a misdirected delivery. I picked up my bag and told Louisa I would be back in an hour and took the elevator down to the street.Dominic’s building was three blocks away. I walked quickly because the October air had turned properly cold overnight, the kind of cold that came with intention and announced that summer was finished and had been for some time and the city had simply been too busy to notice. I pulled my coat tighter and thought about what kind of woman would spend forty minutes in a lob

Chapter 117: The alliance

Serena’s POVDominic stood at the window for two minutes and eleven seconds.I know because I counted. It was easier than sitting in the silence and trying to figure out what was happening behind his eyes while his back was to me and his shoulders were doing the specific thing they did when he was processing something he had not prepared for.I had told him everything.Not in the careful measured way I had imagined telling someone, not the version I had rehearsed in the early months when I used to run through worst case scenarios at two in the morning while Anika slept down the hall. I had told him the way you told someone something when you were finally done carrying it alone, which meant it came out in the right order but without the careful architecture of a woman managing someone else’s reaction.I told him about the gala. About the accusations and the security guards and Vivian’s hand flat against Killian’s chest. About the rain and the highway and the brakes that did nothing whe

Chapter 118: Dinners and confessions

Serena’s POVThe client’s name was Pieter Vandermeer and he was the kind of man who ordered the second most expensive wine on the menu because he thought it made him look considered rather than flashy, talked for forty-five minutes about his family’s shipping empire in Rotterdam before getting to anything resembling business, and laughed at his own jokes with the complete satisfaction of someone who had never once wondered whether other people found them funny.I liked him immediately.Not because he was particularly interesting, though he was interesting enough, but because men like Pieter Vandermeer were useful in specific ways. They filled rooms. They generated the kind of ambient social noise that made other conversations feel private even when they weren’t. And they drank steadily and generously and expected everyone at the table to keep pace with them, which meant that by nine o’clock Killian had consumed more than I had ever seen him consume in a professional setting and was do

Chapter 119: Uncovering secrets

Serena’s POVI did not tell anyone about the message for four days.Not Dominic, who now knew everything else and had earned the right to know this too. Not my informant, who had been pulling David’s outside contacts for two weeks and would have found it useful. Not Killian, who was the reason the information mattered in the first place.I sat with it alone for four days because I needed to understand what I was actually looking at before I handed it to anyone else and let their reaction shape mine.The message had come from an unsaved number. A man, based on the phrasing, though the messages were clipped enough that certainty was a stretch. What it said was specific enough to matter and vague enough to be deniable, the specific combination that people used when they were being careful in writing but not careful enough. He had promised Vivian that Killian would marry her. He had promised that everything they had done would pay off. He had promised to remove whoever got in their way.W

Chapter 120: The truth unfolds

Serena’s POVDominic found it on a Tuesday.I was in a meeting with the Helix Bridge legal team when my phone vibrated twice on the table in front of me. Two messages in quick succession, which was Dominic’s way of saying this cannot wait. I excused myself, stepped into the corridor, and called him back before I had fully closed the meeting room door behind me.“I found the originating account,” he said. No greeting. We had moved past greetings in the past week. “The one I kept almost seeing and then losing. I found it.”I leaned against the corridor wall. “Tell me.”“The payments that funded the case against you, the ones that routed through David’s shell company, they originate from a private holding company incorporated in Delaware eighteen months before the gala. The company has one director on record.” He paused. “The director is a man named Franklin Rhodes.”I went very still.“Killian’s father,” I said.“Killian’s father,” Dominic confirmed. “Who died fourteen months before the

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